People are increasingly interacting with computers and other electronic devices in new and interesting ways. One such interaction approach involves making a detectable motion or gesture with respect to a device, which can be detected using a camera or other such element. While image recognition can be used with existing cameras to determine various types of motion, the amount of processing needed to analyze full color, high resolution images is generally very high. This can be particularly problematic for portable devices that might have limited processing capability and/or limited battery life, which can be significantly drained by intensive image processing. Some devices utilize basic gesture detectors, but these detectors typically are very limited in capacity and only are able to detect simple motions such as up-and-down, right-or-left, and in-and-out. These detectors are not able to handle more complex gestures, such as holding up a certain number of fingers or pinching two fingers together.